Acre and the Unity of the Palestinian People

by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem

We have carried the talk of Palestinian unity far afield, and its pains and its hopes have led us astray, until Acre rose up before us, giving voice to the bitter tragedy the Palestinian people lives everywhere, reminding us that the unity of the Palestinian people is bigger than Hamas and Fatah, and greater than the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza have spoken at length of bringing together the homeland’s two halves, forgetting that the homeland has other fissures that refuse to remain outside it.

Acre and its people have lived under accursed Zionist aggression since 1948, suffering estrangement, persecution, exploitation, and humiliation even as they remain on the land of their homeland, the Zionists disputing with them the land, the glories of Acre, its houses, its arches, and its great and honorable history. Acre is under occupation just as Nablus, Gaza, Hebron, and Jenin are, and it is spared neither by night nor by day from the Zionists’ repressive and arbitrary measures, nor from policies of siege, exhaustion, erasure, and strangulation. And Acre stands firm, as every Palestinian city, village, hamlet, and refugee camp stands firm. It, and its people, are an inseparable part of Palestine — indeed, they are the origin, the coral crown upon the heads of the people of Palestine.

Only yesterday, the Zionists assaulted the people of Acre, treating them as the strangers who have no right to be present on the land of Palestine. Zionists who want Palestine purely for themselves, who never stop pursuing Palestinians wherever they are found, so that no trace of them remains and history forgets them, so that no nation continues to enshrine them in the memories of its past. They assaulted the mass of the people for no reason other than that they were Palestinians, that they were the owners of the land, the people of the house. But the people of Acre did not submit, did not flinch — they rose up in a courageous uprising, full of spirit and resolve, in defense of themselves and their very existence.

The people of Acre are not “Arabs of Israel,” and shame on anyone who has ever applied that label to them. The people of Acre are the Palestinian Arabs who kneaded the land with their blood and their sweat, who stood firm across history against covetous invaders and drove them back in defeat. The people of Acre, and with them all the Palestinian Arabs in the Palestine occupied in ‘48, are the guardians of the homeland, the trustees of its Arab character, its sanctity, and its holy sites. Sixty years of humiliating occupation have not diminished the resolve of the people of Acre, nor their insistence on their own Arab identity and that of their city, and they continue to affirm the authenticity that is the very banner of their survival.

The Palestinian people needs unity — the unity of every sector, every group, and every individual of the people, wherever they may be found. The Palestinian people is one people, with all its components present within the land of Palestine and beyond it. It is the duty of every Palestinian to step outside the confines of the West Bank and Gaza, and to enter, with full awareness, into the wider society and the wider homeland. The people of the West Bank and Gaza make up roughly a third of the Palestinian people, and the West Bank and Gaza together make up less than a quarter of the area of Mandatory Palestine, and they must not withdraw into their own narrow selfhood, for in that lies the death of the whole Palestinian people. The strength of the Palestinian people lies in its unity and its cohesion.

It is true that the unity of the people, in terms of geographic contiguity, is not possible at present, but unity can still be achieved culturally and intellectually, and at the level of the goal and of the means and methods for achieving that goal. There must be covenants, programs, and measures that bring the people together so that all its sons and daughters become as one man, working toward the restoration of the fixed national rights, foremost among them the right of return and the right to self-determination.

The events in Acre must not be allowed to pass as though they concerned only some sectors of the Palestinian people and not others, wherever they may be. The events of Acre are a bell tolling loudly, that we might awaken from this slumber we are in, or from these tedious internal struggles that have done harm to Palestinians everywhere.

Source: Translated from the original Arabic, “عكا ووحدة الشعب الفلسطيني” by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem.